How to make android apps of low size? - android

I was doing a little project thing for my school...
I made a simple calculator app...with simple mathematics operations...
And when the apk file is created and installed, it was consuming the memory space of more than 700 kb in the phone.
While in the android market(play store), there are just similar apps which are of low sizes and are taking memory space of less than 500. I was creating app in eclipse...
Will somebody plz help me out with this that how they do make apps of simple lower size.??

The smallest APK I created is ~35kB. Size increases dramatically with the included assets. Check the size of your /res, /assets and, if you have it, /raw folders. The APK size will be larger than those three combined. Further, any included lib counts, and adds bulk, even (and especially) the compatibility library, if you use it.

If you're having lot of graphic assets, then you should probably look at using 9-patches. They save a lot of memory.

Please elaborate your question. When you say memory, are you referring to the RAM OR the actual storage memory ?
If you are referring to storage memory...
The storage memory depends on how big your application is. For e.g. IF you have too many images of large size, then app size will increase.
By the way, 700K is not really too much. You are OK.

Related

Do I Need Multiple Image Sizes (xxhdpi vs. xxxhdpi)?

Apologies in advance for such a basic question, but this is my first app and I can't quite find a clear answer for my situation. All the images in my app are stored in the drawable folder, I'm NOT downloading any images from the internet. All the information I come across when it comes to multiple image sizes seems to refer to the occasion when the app is fetching images from the internet.
So currently most the images in my app are one size, customized for the largest size - xxxhdpi. However, I understand the app is doing some work to "shrink down" those images for the xxhdpi size screens.
I'm having second thoughts about this one size fits all approach. I'm thinking that perhaps the app doing the work to shrink the image down might take up extra memory and negatively impact performance. I've been looking at the Android Studio Profiler and I've been trying to understand the Graphics Process when I look at the Memory Graph.
More generally speaking, is there a benefit to having the smallest size images possible, even for the xxxhdpi? For example, does it hurt (memory wise or in some other aspect) to use a .png image when I could use a lower quality jpg? Again, just to super clear, this is just in the scenario when the app has all of its images in the drawable folder. My app has options where players can change the game background and other images so I want to be sure I'm optimizing how the images for best performance. Thanks.
Memory. If you load a bitmap of x by y pixels, in memory that takes 4*x*y bytes. For a full screen image, you can expext that to be 4000*1000*4 or 16 MB. That's a good chunk of memory to a small device, which also tends to have less RAM. If instead it needed one at half the resolution, you would have 2000*500*4, or 4 MB.
Obviously this scales with size. The smaller your images, the less memory wasted. I wouldn't argue that you need to provide every size, but if you're using large images I'd provide more than one. Also, for anything that isn't incredibly complex (like icons) I'd consider vector images instead (although that's a CPU time vs memory tradeoff).
You mentioned png vs jpg. There's two things to consider there: apk size and image quality. JPG is smaller, so it will lead to a smaller apk size. PNG is lossless, so it will have higher quality (although whether that matters requires a human visual check- it matters less than you'd think on a lot of things). Interestingly it doesn't effect the amount of memory used at runtime, because both are held in the Bitmap object uncompressed.

Android apk size less than 20kb

Need to build an android apk less than 20kb, and rest of the contents in the app should download dynamically, does anyone have idea about that.
If i create a simple android app and build it without any source code, it results in 3 MB atleast.
So, so pls someone suggest me how can we create an apk in kb.
I decided this would be a fun challenge, and was able to make a tiny app (no real functionality) that was 16kb. You can find the source code here. It would have been even smaller with only ldpi assets.
Some caveats:
Don't expect an app with any real functionality to come in this small. Keep in mind that 20kb is around 20,000 characters worth of data, which would be about the length of a very short story. 20kb really isn't realistic, and you are going to end up taking up that extra space on your user's phone when you download the "rest of the app" later anyway.
My example has only mdpi assets. Things like launcher icons have to be bundled with your application, so either your icon will look awful on large devices, or you need to modify your requirements.
Some tips:
Enable proguard. Both minification and obfuscation. The latter is a hyper-optimization, but when you are trying to go that small, every bit helps.
Take out any libraries that aren't absolutely mission critical. You aren't going to make it with any of the support library.
Support only the lowest resolution screens you can. ldpi assets will look bad on high density screens, but are exponentially smaller than mdpi, which is exponentially smaller than hdpi, etc. Resources are almost guaranteed to be the largest piece of the app.
Read all of the Shrink Your Code documentation. One great tip if you are using any libraries that provide resources is to use resConfigs to strip out any languages, densities, and native ABIs that you don't need.
Android Studio 3.0 has an "analyze APK" feature that will break down what pieces of the APK are taking up the most space- use that to identify your targets for cutting down the size.

How much memory does a PNG image take up?

In my app, I am going to have 750 PNG images in my drawable folder. I am getting these images by taking screenshots from my computer.
When I built my app with all of the images, the app's file size was 140MB. Then, When I removed all of the images and rebuilt it, it went down to 2.75 MB.
Is there any way to reduce the amount of memory the PNG images take up? Would reducing the size of my screenshot be an effective solution?
I am going to have 750 PNG images in my drawable folder
Most likely, that is not what you want. res/drawable/ is a synonym for res/drawable-mdpi/. Your image will be resampled to match the density of the device, potentially taking up a lot more heap space. Usually, something like screenshots go in res/drawable-nodpi/, to indicate that the images should not be resampled based on density.
When I built my app with all of the images, the app's memory was 140MB. Then, When I removed all of the images and rebuilt it, it went down to 2.75 MB.
I am going to interpret this as meaning the size of the APK, which in turn controls the starting amount of disk space associated with your app. Please understand that Android does not have an "Application Manager", even though your specific device might have such an app.
Is there any way to reduce the amount of memory the PNG images take up? Would reducing the size of my screenshot be an effective solution?
If by "size" you mean "resolution", then that will reduce the file sizes of the PNG files and should reduce the file size of your APK.
As a now-deleted answer points out, you can also reduce the file size of the PNG files using tools like pngquant, that optimize the PNG in ways that your screenshot tool perhaps did not.
And, you can reduce the size of your APK by reducing the number of screenshots. How many of your users are really going to look at 750 screenshots? You might consider packaging a subset of those with the app, downloading additional ones as needed from some server.

Why an android application becomes slower to respond

I had an android app built especially for medium screen size android devices.
Now it was required to build that same app for a device called nook-color (by Barnes & Noble)
So for this we made all the images bigger & size & changed the layouts.
The result is that the apk which was 97.5 Mb earlier has now become 124 Mb in size.
Now the testers have complained that the application has become slower and it takes a little longer for any screen to open up. I am wondering whether this is due to bigger images or there is something else.
Can you please tell me what could be the reason for this.
124 Mb for an app seems to be a little bit excessive. I'd suggest trying to scale down the image assets, use Nine Patch images, as well as using PNGCrush
Yes. The delays are (at least in part) due to loading larger images (de-compressing them to bitmaps, to be more exact). Unless you can't help it, you should attempt to convert as many of these images to 9-patches : http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/draw9patch.html.

how drawables resources stored on device

guys, I wonder if you put images for each density type (low/medium/high) and there are quite a few of them, won't it increase the size of application footprint on internal memory?
I would hope that android will put only needed resource file from apk to the actual application folder. Can somebody confirm that?
It will increase the size of the .apk, because those images need to be in the .apk. It will not increase the RAM footprint of the app at runtime. When an app is installed it is kept as its original .apk, so the storage space needed will be basically the size of your .apk.

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